Integrated circuits are commonly disposed in carrier devices known as sleeves during the later stages of the manufacturing process and thereafter. These sleeves are generally tubular in shape and are constructed of hard, transparent plastic or similar materials.
During final test, marking and other late-stage manufacturing operations, integrated circuits must be removed from these sleeves and individually handled. The majority of the commonly used integrated circuit handlers currently in wide use require manual handling of the sleeves during such operations. In other words, a human operator inserts individual, oriented sleeves into the handler and places individual, oriented empty sleeves to be filled by the handler. Obviously, such manual handling is inconsistent with the need to reduce direct labor costs in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,498,574 discloses an automated sleeve handler which provides the basic functions required: singulation, orientation and presentation for loading and/or unloading. However, the design of this sleeve handler is relatively complex mechanically. In addition, this handler provides only one of the loading and unloading functions, but not both. Thus, manual handling between a full sleeve handler and an empty sleeve handler is required.
Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 655,773, filed Oct. 1, 1984 and assigned to the assignee of the present invention, discloses a more advanced automated sleeve handler which provides the functions of singulation and orientation, then passes the sleeve on to a subsequent handling operation. While this design is mechanically simpler and perhaps more reliable than that of the '574 patent, it still provides only half of the required sleeve handling for an automated integrated circuit handler.